Design

The swelling numbers of interior design and lifestyle shops popping up in China, makes it quite clear that Chinese consumers have a developing appreciation for design. Increasingly, interior and furniture design is becoming a staple of luxury events targeted at affluent Chinese consumers. As I already mentioned in my previous article The rise of multi-label and lifestyle brands in China, more and more auction houses have been adding a design and furniture element to their sales, encouraged by Chinese consumers’ design savvy shopping habits abroad. The trend is for well-decorated spaces to become increasingly important to Chinese consumers. This fact is...

In Beijing, it seems that everyone is opening up a vintage shop. From the American, retro-cowboy, rockabilly vintage of the shops in Gulou, to the more European vintage of Sanlitun’s House of Willow, there are so many different vintage boutiques that have mushroomed around the city. Vintage is still a niche market in general. It still has a concentrated appeal—it’s not for everyone. These shops complement their brick-and-mortar shops with E-commerce platforms that serve more for marketing purposes than actual sales. These WeChat platform are more like style blogs where everything it’s about lifestyle. Mainstream luxury vs niche luxury Consumption in...

Maximalism If you ever set foot in a hotel, bar, KTV or restaurant of a tier two Chinese city, you are probably familiar with the extravaganza of the interiors. If you ever walked down the streets of Xidan, Beijing youngsters’ shopping district, you’ve already jumped into some serious fashion-tackiness. If you’ve ever scrolled down the dark alleys of any of the popular Chinese live broadcasting apps I’m sure you noticed that over-styling has been taken by many way beyond the limitations of fashion. Over the past five to six years many Chinese women asked their plastic surgeons to make them “look...

In the past year I’ve been involved in many commercial real estate projects. Specifically I have been working on creative concepts for the seasonal marketing campaigns of Chinese Shopping Centers. After having been in touch with some of the most prominent clients in the market, I wanted to write down some thoughts on the trends that I’ve noticed in China. New downtowns Guangjie, which roughly translates as window shopping, is increasingly seen by China’s newly affluent consumers as a key pastime. Rapid urbanization and the continuing growth of disposable incomes and expenditure has been the driving force behind the shopping mall...

Perhaps the most significant specific trend within the new customer-centric universe is the pervasiveness of mobile as the leading technology in the movement toward omnichannel marketing. While consumers are now interacting with brands through a variety of different media including email, social media, PCs, tablets, smartphones and the store, mobile has taken the lead as the dominant channel for retailers based on its convenience and consistent presence with the consumer. These trends are only expected to continue as the market moves toward the next evolution of customer-centric technology and all it has to offer. When e-commerce and later social media took off,...

…continuing from Part 2 “At work I’m organized and rational while I’m emotional and unstable on a personal level” Room for randomness sometimes brings up nice surprises. And surprisingly enough, architecture and design were not young age vocations for neither of them. Lyndon wanted to be a painter but growing up in a Chinese family he was not allowed to pursue such a goal that was considered to be trivial. He had lied to his parents saying that he was studying mechanical engineering, but before they went to visit him in the States, he managed to switch to architecture, that...